Page:The Hindu-Arabic Numerals (1911).djvu/54

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THE HINDU-ARABIC NUMERALS

Modern American reading, 8 billion, 443 million, 682 thousand, 155.

Hindu, 8 padmas, 4 vyarbudas, 4 kōṭis, 3 prayutas, 6 lakṣas, 8 ayutas, 2 sahasra, 1 śata, 5 daśan, 5.

Arabic and early German, eight thousand thousand thousand and four hundred thousand thousand and forty-three thousand thousand, and six hundred thousand and eighty-two thousand and one hundred fifty-five (or five and fifty).

Greek, eighty-four myriads of myriads and four thousand three hundred sixty-eight myriads and two thousand and one hundred fifty-five.

As Woepcke[1] pointed out, the reading of numbers of this kind shows that the notation adopted by the Hindus tended to bring out the place idea. No other language than the Sanskrit has made such consistent application, in numeration, of the decimal system of numbers. The introduction of myriads as in the Greek, and thousands as in Arabic and in modern numeration, is really a step away from a decimal scheme. So in the numbers below one hundred, in English, eleven and twelve are out of harmony with the rest of the -teens, while the naming of all the numbers between ten and twenty is not analogous to the naming of the numbers above twenty. To conform to our written system we should have ten-one, ten-two, ten-three, and so on, as we have twenty-one, twenty-two, and the like. The Sanskrit is consistent, the units, however, preceding the tens and hundreds. Nor did any. other ancient people carry the numeration as far as did the Hindus.[2]

  1. ↑ Propagation, loc. cit., p. 443.
  2. ↑ See the quotation from The Light of Asia in Chapter II, p. 16.
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